Feeds

RSS and Atom feeds offer you a simple way to keep up with the latest
information hosted on developerWorks. developerWorks offers you two
ways to sign up for feeds: pre-defined feeds (below) and custom feeds that you define yourself.

Learn more about feeds

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) files are standard
XML-based files that provide a means for syndicating and
aggregating web content. The files contain metadata
commonly used to provide descriptive information about
the content, context, and characteristics of data. Using
RSS files, a data feed can be created that supplies
headlines, links, and article summaries from a web site.
These files describe a channel of information that can
include a logo, a site link, an input box, and multiple
news items. Other websites can incorporate this
information into their pages automatically or use the
feeds to provide a site with current news headlines.
These techniques allow distribution of up-to-date
information for any given website.

The Atom format is also text-based XML and is similar to
RSS. Atom was developed to improve upon RSS and can
offer you more flexibility in the presentation and
maintainability of your feeds.

The HTML format is an easy way to display RSS feeds on
your website without using a feed reader. You can
specify the parameters for the type and amount of
content you want, and the HTML code is put together and
displayed for you. You can copy and paste the HTML code
right into your own web page. Once you have the code,
you can easily update the code to change the parameters
or customize the presentation of the content. If you
like to have flexibility in displaying new content on
your website, HTML is for you.

For a very quick overview of how RSS feeds make it
easy to keep up with what's new on the sites you
regularly visit, read this short blog post on Keeping up with feeds.

Get information on Atom feeds in the article "An overview of the Atom 1.0 Syndication
Format," which discusses Atom's technical
strengths relative to other syndication formats, and
offers several compelling use case examples that
illustrate those strengths.